GERMANY 2000: PFORZHEIM

December 16, 2000

The first year I took travel pictures with a digital camera was 2009. We had some great trips before that, and I documented them by creating traditional scrapbooks. I have decided to try to digitize those memories by scanning the photos and writing up the trips here. This is my first attempt. While I have already written about much of what is in this first post, I include an expanded version here as the first part of our trip in 2000.

Our daughter, a French major at Brigham Young University at the time, completed a study abroad semester in Paris in Fall 2000. We decided that we and her two younger brothers would meet her in Europe in December and spend some time touring around France together. My mother, a German immigrant who traveled to Germany quite often, suggested that we tack on a trip to Germany with her as our guide, something I had always wanted to do. The trip was set. My husband and I had traveled to Great Britain the previous year, but this was our first trip to mainland Europe.

We flew into Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris where we met our daughter (who looked tres chic in her black leather coat, black pants, black boots, and a red French scarf) and picked up a rental van. We drove about 350 miles from Paris to the German city of Pforzheim, which is about 20 miles over the border, where we met up with my mother. We did make one stop at Verdun after making our way out of Paris, a stop memorable not for the sites that we saw but for the loaf of French bread and cheese that we bought at a convenience store. It was the first time we had tasted Boursin cheese, and we were wowed. We knew that our belts were in for some serious stretching on this trip.

It felt almost surreal to cross the border from France into Germany, and later into Austria, then back into Germany before ending up in France again. My husband had been in Europe as a pre-teen and remembers difficulty crossing the borders, and we had had our own experiences crossing the U.S./Mexico border that involved long waits.  We just breezed past the old border-crossing station near the Rhine river and Baden-Baden on our way into Germany, although we did get a little lost at that point as we struggled with the change in signage.

We met my mother at a hotel in Pforzheim, and again I was struck that though I was thousands of miles from home, my mother was in the city she grew up in--her homeland. I was reminded that I really didn't know my mother that well. Her youth was foreign to me in every way. (She died about nine years after this trip together, and how I wish that I could take another trip to Germany with her now.)

We had a decent night's sleep and started our first day in Germany with a fantastic breakfast provided by the hotel, complete with herring, several types of cold cuts, hard-boiled eggs, several kinds of cheese, bread and rolls, fruit, yogurt, cereal, and juice. You know, a standard European breakfast. (These days there is no way Bob could see a spread like that and not take pictures, but in those days when we had a limited number of film cartridges that we had to cart around, it didn't happen.)

As a side note, I love this clipping I have in the trip scrapbook. It defines my mother perfectly.

I don't know what the population of Pforzheim was in 2000 when we were there, but today it is a city of over 125,000 inhabitants. It is located on the edge of the mythical (to me) Black Forest.

(Postcard from my scrapbook showing city center and Enz River)

Modern Pforzheim

My mother was born in 1926, which means she was 13 when World War II officially began in 1939, and she was 19 when it ended in 1945. I think of my own happy, carefree teenage years and can't imagine what hers were like.

On February 23, 1945, Pforzheim was bombed by the Allies, specifically the RAF, which dropped 1575 tons of high explosives and incendiary bombs that killed about 17,600 people, or over 31% of the city's population. Approximately 83% of the Pforzheim's buildings were destroyed, and the city center was completely wiped out. In my family when I was growing up, our mother would often mark the anniversary with tears, and she was not a woman who cried often. 

I have these copies of photos given to me by my mother in my scrapbook that show Pforzheim after the bombing in 1945:

It took three years to clean up the rubble created by 22 minutes of bombing. My mother also gave me this photo of the "new" Pforzheim taken sometime after the war. 

Here is the caption she had written for the picture:

The "mountain" (I think it is actually the hill in front of the mountain) is also known as "Wallberg" and is filled with 58 million cubic feet of rubble. 

Our first stop was the Pforzheim cemetery.

There is an area dedicated as a memorial to the victims of the bombing. Each stone is engraved with about 20 names. I'm sure that doesn't represent all the dead. That would require 880 markers.

It's a little hard to see, but the stone wall contains the date of the attack and the number killed.

My great-uncle, Gustav Adolf Schmid, died in 1962 and is buried in another portion of the cemetery.  (I recently learned that a child born before him who lived only a year was named Adolf Gustav Schmid.) Below his wife's name is the name of their son, Karl Schmid, who was killed in action in Leningrad during World War II at age 29, as well as the name of a daughter, Elsbeth, who lived until 1992.

My mother took us to Sophienstrasse 34, where the apartment building her family lived in used to stand. It is just one block from the Enz River, shown below:

A current map shows the location of the block-long street.

The Allies claimed that Pforzheim was a center for making precision instruments used in the war effort, and that almost every family in the town center was involved in their manufacture, as well as there being larger factories north and south of the city center. That was their justification for the bombing  that began at 7:50 PM, lasted a total of 22 minutes, and included a whopping 379 aircraft. A mix of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped, leading to an almost immediate cataclysmic firestorm. The glare from the conflagration could be seen 100 miles away.

My mother was working on a farm in the country some distance away from Pforzheim, but her only brother and her widowed mother were still in the city. She could see the hellish glow of the fire on the horizon and knew it was Pforzheim. She told us that she didn't know if her mother and brother had survived for two weeks. It is a miracle that they did as they lived close to the town center. People died from the explosions, from collapsing buildings, from poisonous gases, and from lack of oxygen that was consumed by the raging flames. Temperatures at the center of the firestorm are thought to have reached 2900° Fahrenheit. 

My grandmother and uncle were hiding in the cellar of their building with other residents. Underground tunnels had been dug between buildings to allow people to move away from danger, and my grandmother and uncle crawled through those tunnels as the buildings above burned and collapsed, eventually making their way to the river.

My mother showed us the steps that they ran down to reach what they thought would save them--cool water and resulting oxygen--but even the water was on fire as phosphorus bits floated on its surface, and certainly the water's temperature must have been dangerously high in places. 

As noted earlier, about 83% of the city was destroyed, and 17,600 inhabitants were killed. The British Bombing Survey Unit concluded that the bombing of Pforzheim was likely "the greatest proportion in one raid during the war."

And yet, somehow my grandmother and uncle survived. No wonder my mother was incredibly anti-war. She reminded us many times as we were growing up that the victors write history and that we had no idea how horrible it all was.

Well, after that we needed some "lighter" fare. Here is Bob in his infamous purple pants debonairly matched with a blue-green jacket mimicking a statue in downtown Pforzheim.

And we thoroughly enjoyed being shown around town while my mother reminisced about her days in the Gymnasium (German high school for college-bound students). She even showed us the bridge where she had her first kiss.

READING

I've done so much reading about World War II, but two books stand out as relevant to this particular part of our trip.

The best of the two books is Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War by Giles Milton, which tells the story of Wolfram Aïchele and his family, who lived in the small village of Eutingen just three miles outside Pforzheim. The author is actually the son-in-law of Wolfram Aïchele, and that intimacy is reflected in his account of Wolfram's life. 

Born in 1924, Wolfram was two years older than my mother and would have shared some of the same experiences she had growing up. It was fascinating to read about what life and the rise of Hitler was like for the Jews in Pforzheim, what the locals knew about what was going on (both with the Jews and with the war itself), how Hitler Youth became established there, what rationing during the war was like, and other things. 

At age 18, Wolfram was drafted into the army, where he served as a radio operator. He almost died of diphtheria, but was sent back to the front after his recovery, ending up in Normandy during the D-Day Invasion. After his surrender, Wolfram experienced a series of POW camps, eventually landing in one in Oklahoma, of all places.

Of particular interest to me was the powerful telling of the bombing of Pforzheim, perhaps the best description I've read (although only a couple of chapters in the book). Also, a chapter or two describes the grueling first few years after the war when there was no food, little housing, and incredible poverty. It was a powerful, emotional read for me as I thought about what my mother must have gone through. 

This is a great book to get a little bit more of the average German person's point of view about the pre-war through post-war years in their country. There were many things that I did not know, and others that I had already heard from my mother. This is the book my siblings and I wish we had about our mother's life, but she refused to go into this kind of detail.

The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner has a totally different theme but intersects with the first book with a description of the bombing of Pforzheim. This historical novel is the story of two young girls, one of Japanese descent and one of German descent, who become close friends in a camp in Texas. (I didn’t know that some German Americans were sent to internment camps during World War II just like Japanese-Americans.) The focus is on the German girl, whose family is ultimately deported back to their hometown of Pforzheim, Germany before the end of the war. 

The description of the bombing of Pforzheim in this book is horrible, but not nearly as detailed and graphic as the description in Wolfram, nor as horrible as what we heard from our mother. I felt the post-war section of the book was much weaker than the preceding sections and really detracted from the overall themes and atmosphere of the book. So overall, not as good as Wolfram, but still a worthwhile read for a different perspective.